


rapture and solace

by oh_my_stars_and_sky



Category: Beetlejuice (1988), Beetlejuice (Cartoon 1989), Beetlejuice - All Media Types, Beetlejuice - Perfect/Brown & King
Genre: Angst and Fluff and Smut, Brief discussion of suicide, F/M, Falling In Love, Sexual Content, beetlebabes, i just want lydia and beetlejuice to be happy ok, lydia is in college
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:54:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24602710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oh_my_stars_and_sky/pseuds/oh_my_stars_and_sky
Summary: Lydia Deetz has been living an empty life for quite some time. A senior in college, she feels purposeless and alone. When her past begins to catch up to her via a sexual predilection for a certain (un)dead bachelor, she toys with making a deal with the devil, so to speak. Only, she finds perhaps he has been as lonely as she is.Or:A horny and depressed 21 year old Lydia summons Beej without thinking it all the way through. Together, they determine that life is, in fact, worth living.
Relationships: Beetlejuice & Lydia Deetz, Beetlejuice/Lydia Deetz
Comments: 34
Kudos: 167





	rapture and solace

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so excited to publish this!!! It's my first fic in this fandom but I've been obsessed with this ship for a while now. I wrote this in part as a means to escape from the craziness of everything that's been going on; between the blm riots (donate if you can!!!! any little bit helps) and the virus and the general pre-apocalyptic tone that's been arising, I've been in a pretty bad funk. I guess I wrote this in a way to remind myself that there is great happiness in the world, and that even when I feel alone and worthless there is reason to keep going. I took great joy in reminding Lydia of that, at any rate.
> 
> Beetlejuice as I write him (and the facts of the situation, for that matter) is a pretty even mix of cartoon, musical and movie. I reference events from all three. I really hope you enjoy, and stay safe!!!

She sees him only seldomly, for a long time, and yet somehow she sees him everyday.

There’s a green hue to the mug she takes her morning coffee (black, no sugar) in. She told herself she bought it because she liked it, but she knows she bought it because she sees him when she looks at it. 

Whenever something goes wrong in a way that is deliciously right, she is sure his hand is in it. (Once, her history professor, having just flunked her on an essay she was sure she did well on because he disagreed with her stance, took a swig from his coffee mug, only to find it had somehow miraculously become infested with beetles. His scream could curdle blood. She curled her toes in her combat boots and bit her smile off her lip. He spat and spat to no avail, beetles gleefully crawling in and out of his mouth. The mug crashed onto his computer, and the coffee wrecked the laptop. He lost all of their assignments and grades, and ended up passing the whole class to avoid having to regrade everything. All of that was great, but didn’t hold a candle to the lightness in her belly she felt, watching him writhe, covered in bugs that could not have gotten there on their own.   
Impossible. She knows it's impossible.  
She is sure it was him, nonetheless.)

When it's dark out, when the night is full of minute and unidentifiable noises, every shadow looks like him. She’d never say that out loud.

Every time she laughs, she feels him in her gut. It is terrible. 

Occasionally, occasionally, she swears she catches him peering at her through her bedroom mirror, but when she looks back, he’s gone.

She floats through life; often she feels nothing, and when she feels something, it is hardly ever good. It's an emptiness she has come to rely on.

Twenty-one and restless, she has fucked her way through all of the classics department, most of the music department, and has made a decent dent in the illustration department. She has never fucked another photography major, though, or, in fact, another photographer. She knows damn well that to be a photographer, you have to see through things. You have to understand how the world is constructed, how people are constructed. So she stays wary of photographers but brings home almost anybody else. 

It goes like this: they see her in a study hall, or a class, or a hallway, or on the street. Something about her intrigues them- the black lace, the camera around her neck. Once or twice, it is the ring on her finger. In any event, she makes no effort to get to know them. She is abrupt and forward and it catches them off guard. If they are particularly prudish and she is horny enough to indulge them, they go out for a drink or two. Then, they proceed back to her apartment. She undresses them quickly and without fanfare, but takes great satisfaction mapping their bodies with her hands, with her mouth. She sees flickers of him, in them. A glint of green in an eye, a particularly gravely moan. It is in her head. It doesn’t matter. She is a thorough, if dispassionate, lover. No one leaves unsatisfied. Boys and girls and cigarettes; she cums apathetically and she shows them to the door.

She must have a reputation, at this point, she muses dryly, but it must be a good one, if people keep coming. Sometimes they ask her for her number. She pretends she is hard of hearing. 

When her parents ask how she is, she tells them she is just fine, and she is not lying.

They don’t know she still thinks of him. It all happened so quickly in the end that they decided, after a moment of held breath, that they must have vanquished him permanently. A strict ban on the B-word was put into place. Nowadays, they never talk about it at all. They’ve buried that whole ordeal six feet under, where it belongs. But she unearths it every night in her mind, pulls it all out of the coffin they unceremoniously stuffed it into, those few days, the rush of it all. She heaves his body up last, feels his weight against her. She can’t help herself; she’s always been fascinated by the dead, hasn’t she. Some might say she’s processing trauma, but she would argue that they probably don’t know her very well.

Some nights, she prefers her own company. She watches old horror movies and reads musty tomes and some nights, she touches herself. At first, she wouldn’t let herself acknowledge his presence in her mind as she coaxed herself to climax, lying prone on her striped bed sheets, biting her lip till it bled. Bit by bit, the sheer desire wore her down. One day, she finally acquiesces. What is it that pushes her over the edge? The lecture on the paranormal in her comparative lit class? The man on the subway, with his tie askew and his hands stained with something unplaceable? Maybe it was just the time between her and him, unsurmountable and growing each second, that made her ache so unspeakably for him. 

That night, she pictures him over her, imagines the weight of his body, the electrifying chill of his hands on her skin. 

It starts like this; he binds her to her bedpost with some force she cannot see. Once she’s figured out she can’t move, he strips her down painfully slowly, starting with her shirt and ending with her stockings, and kisses every inch of skin he finds as he goes. Her immobility becomes the sweetest torture, as she gets wetter and wetter, desperate for some sort of friction, but he is intent on his ministrations and pays her begging no mind, telling her to be a good girl. 

Finally, finally, he kisses back up her leg, taking one of her breasts into his mouth and kisses it tenderly before biting down hard. She shrieks and he chuckles, at last dipping a finger into her dripping pussy, bringing it up to play with her clit until she’s incoherent. 

“Someone’s all ready for me. You enjoying yourself, babes?” he asks.

“Yes, please, god, please,” she gasps.

“You haven’t quite earned it yet, babes, have you?”

She feels herself arms and legs freed, and she scrambles to straddle him.

“Not so fast,” he says, peeling off his shirt and shucking his pants with nonchalance, and she gets the message, sinking to her knees. His cock is dauntingly big, but she does her best to take his whole length and girth down her throat. After only a few obscene strokes of her tongue, he pushes her head back.

“Good girl,” he pants, “good girl,” and then he hefts her up and slides her in one motion down onto his cock. She moans at the stretch, at the perfect ache as she bounces, nearly frenzied, on his cock. He grips her ass and pushes her up and down, steadying her pace, swearing into her clavicle, and she is so close, she’s right there- 

She cums furiously and quickly, and then buries her face in her pillow, distinctly alone in her bed.

*****

The ramifications of acknowledging such a bone-crushing desire are impossible to define, and doubly daunting in that she sees no way to satiate it. 

She stops fucking around. There is nothing in anyone at her college she is interested in anymore. She gets better at small talk, so she feels less like she’s going crazy. There’s a strange comfort in tossing phrases back and forth lazily with a stranger without having an ulterior motive. Crazy weather, Just heading to class, I like your shirt too, No I’m not consumed every waking moment by an ineffable need to fuck a decaying demon I haven’t seen in half a decade, Yes I did catch that show-

The chatter is meaningless, but it fills up the gaps in her week quite nicely.

On the weekends, she allows herself to lay in bed, watching the shadows shift across the room. She doesn’t touch herself the whole time. She allows herself fantasies, which become increasingly delusional with each passing day. Him, tangled in bed with her, him, biting his way up her neck, him, pinning her against the wall, him, undressing her a thousand times, him, whisking her away to the Neitherworld, to that roadhouse he told her about, him, kissing the ring on her finger, the one he put there so long ago, him, holding her close, him, him, him.

As time goes on, her fantasies start to drift away from the strictly sexual. She pictures sharing the good bottle of brandy she has tucked away with him, imagines swaying with his arms wrapped around her, dancing drunken together in her small kitchen as her old Vashti Bunyan record floats loftily from her dusty record player. Her mind offers her infinite holes in her life he could fill. Behind her closed eyes, he sits next to her in the park, quietly narrating the lives of passersby; he lays on the roof of her apartment complex by her side, pointing to each star in turn, telling her wild tales of their origin; he comes with her to her mother’s grave; he picks her up from her gallery showings, kissing her temple and telling her she’s the best in the game, even when her stuff doesn’t sell.

She supposes it is solitude, a quiet sort of all consuming loneliness, that causes her to cradle this memory of him, to build him into a man by her side.

Every so often, she still swears she catches a glimpse of him in her mirror. She wonders if he’s ever caught her. She wonders if it’s all in her mind.

It is three months of this torture before his name escapes her lips.   
She is delirious, sleepily cumming for the fourth time that day at the thought of his touch.   
It unfurls off her tongue, lolling from her without a thought, in half a hiss, half a whisper- “Beetlejuice”. 

She doesn’t remember if she really said it, the next morning. She’s not sure if she hopes she did or not.

******

She’s sure she’s gone mad when she starts considering summoning him. She’s not even sure that she still can, not sure what became of him after everything that happened. She tries to reason with herself that it isn’t a good idea. It isn’t. She finds, almost immediately, that she doesn’t care. 

She simply can’t keep living like this. 

She lights some candles, because it only feels right. She chooses her clothes carefully, trying to articulate something she can’t say out loud. She ends up in a high-waisted pair of black velveteen slacks, and a deep purple shirt with a sweetheart neckline. She sits in front of her vanity, running a brush through her hair, dumb with nerves, before tying it back with a black lace ribbon. She debates the ring. Rueful, she leaves it on. She steels herself.

She sits stock still, unable to form the words. She is out of her mind, but she can’t help herself. She slips softly out of her chair, onto the floor, her head in her hands. She sighs and kneels, almost as though in prayer. Maybe she is. Ultimately, all she can do is close her eyes and say it, breathy and loud as she dares, “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice”.

The silence that rings out in response almost drowns her. It serves her right, she thinks, holding on to those memories, letting them get the better of her. Squeezing her eyes shut even tighter, she begins to cry, silently shaking with sobs. 

“Whats’amatter, babes? Missed me?”

Her breath catches in her throat. There is a moment that lasts a billion years, wherein she wills her eyes to open.

And there he is, in front of her, no different than the last time she’d seen him. His hair is a wild shade of green, haphazardly tousled and mangy. There is a wry smile playing his lips. She distantly feels herself shaking, feeling her eyes opening wider and wider, as if trying to drink in as much of him as possible: the pinstripes, the smirk, the mischievous eyes. She stills, takes a gulping breath. She has a solitary moment of horrified sanity, wherein she silently berates herself for freeing him, before she scrambles to find the right thing to say.

“It's been a long time,” she says finally.

“Has it?” he asks devilishly, quirking an eyebrow. God. “Ya know, time works differently when you’re dead.”

“It’s been five years, since. Well, since everything happened,” she says, choosing her words carefully.

“Heh, it’s a shame that didn’t work out. Well, no harm, no foul, babes, you didn’t ride that sandworm, that was Barb’s doin’, I don’t hold ya any ill will or nothin’. Besides, you did just, ah, say the magic words, and I’ve been itchin to get out properly, so we’ll call bygones bygones,” he drawls cavalierly, summoning himself a green armchair and sitting down in front of her.

“How did you survive?” she blurts out. Why would you ask that? She thinks frantically, still processing the adrenaline of having him so close.

He doesn’t seem bothered, popping a beetle into his mouth before answering. “Sandworms eat regular ghosts. Ya know, dead breathers, plain and simple. Me, I’m a little more complicated, seeing as I’m a demon and all. Still a ghost, but I’ve got a few, heh, upgrades, so to speak. Course, it was no picnic, but I recovered eventually.”

She wants to ask him what those upgrades entail, wants to ask how he became a demon, wants to ask a million things but she doesn’t want to push her luck just yet, so she settles on “And what have you been up to, since?” 

“Oh, I’ve been around,” he says, grinning mischievously.

“Have you been spying on me?” she asks, pointedly. 

“Well now, babes, spying is a hard word to define. Lotsa mirrors in the world, after all. Lots to see. Plenty of people to torment. Who’s to say, if I slip through here now and then?” He is the same, he is just the same, it ignites every sinew of her body to hear him stride so casually back into conversation with her.

“And my history professor?”

Beetlejuice scowls. “That asshole got what was comin’ to him.”

“So that was you!” she cries, shifting herself to sit more comfortably on the floor, looking up at him, feeling a rare smile grace her lips. 

“Who else?” he asks. “There’s not much I can do, without being summoned, but every so often I can pull somethin’ small off. I am the Ghost with the Most, after all.”

“Why’d you do it?” she asks, cautiously.

“Not so fast Lyds,” he says, “you got a question, now I get one.”

“Alright,” she concedes, biting her lip, still utterly unmoving, taking in his presence, how he still glowed with the same quiet, grimy, intriguing ostentation he always had.

“Why did ya summon me?”

“Why did I summon you?” she repeats slowly. She should have anticipated this. It would be dangerous, foolhardy, and not altogether true to tell him she summoned him just to have sex. Shit. 

“I- need your help.” she says dumbly. This was, at best, a half-truth.

“Anything for you, babes, ‘specially seeing as you set me free and all. Whatcha in the market for?”

Good question, she thinks, fidgeting, eyes darting around the room, looking for something, anything to pin this on. Her eyes land on an old, broken lamp, standing in the corner. It was black and ornate, and she was quite fond of it. She’d had it since she was a child, but it hadn’t worked in several years. She swallows, and points to it.

“I was wondering if you- if you could fix my lamp.”

“Your lamp?” he asks incredulously.

“It’s old,” she says, quickly feigning confidence, “and to be honest, my mom gave it to me. It hasn’t worked in a while, and I’ve done everything I could think of, but it doesn’t seem to want to work. I thought maybe-”

“Say no more, babes.” He snapped his fingers, and the lamp was glowing softly. 

She smiled instinctively and widely. Though it hadn’t been her reason for calling him, it did bring her great peace and joy to see the lamp work again. 

“Well, if that’s all-” he began. Shit.

“While you’re here-” she interjects, too loud, too quickly, but she only has so much patience for tact, “why don’t you, um, stay for a while?”

He is silent, looks at her with a furrowed brow.

“We could watch a movie?” she says, aware of how lame she sounds.

To her surprise and great relief, he replies “Hell, why not? I’m here anyhow, aren’t I?”

She bites her grin back into an appropriate smile, and motions for him to join her in the living room. As she bends over to toggle the VHS player to life, he makes himself comfortable on her couch.

“Heh, shoulda known you’d be old-fashioned,” he teases as she rewinds the tape for The Fly. She rises, crosses to sit beside him after only a moment of hesitation.

She supposes he might have spent a long time lonely too, by the way he stays till dawn, by the way he doesn’t recoil when she softly slots her head onto his shoulder in the middle of their third Vincent Price movie. 

*****

She doesn’t send him back to hell. She doesn’t have the heart to. The sun begins filtering in her window just as the credits roll on their fifth or sixth flick. She yawns, and disentangles herself from him, stretching. He smiles at her, and for a long time, neither of them say anything. 

“I oughta be off, babes. Plenty catchin’ up to do, after all.”

She shifts, curls up around the throw pillow, and he is gone.

When she wakes, she finds a hand-scribbled note on the back of a pink advertisement for bio-exorcism, reading: Always good to see you. Thanks again.

She smiles more than she’d like to admit when she first reads it, and tucks it in her bedside drawer. It was a difficult, cosmic sort of math she was trying to do. How soon could she call him again? Should she wait for him to seek her out? She could not step back and examine it, for fear she would be consumed by it. Instead, she brews some coffee and hedges her bets.

******

The next time the opportunity presents itself, it is late at night. She had stayed late at the university dark room, having months ago snagged a key to it from a janitor in exchange for pro-bono portraits of him and his wife. The time had gotten away from her; it was nearly one in the morning, and the bus wasn’t running anymore. She sighs, unenthused at the prospect of walking home alone. A thought occurs to her, and before she can give herself time to consider it, she hears herself saying the words; “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.”

He lands gently on the desk next to her, very nearly making a mess of her developing fluids.

“Lyds? How’re things?”

She surveys him in the dark, feeling herself flush. She prays he can’t see it.

“Not bad, but I’ve gotta get home, and I, uh, I don’t want to go alone.”

She can’t quite tell in the dark, but she thinks he looks confused. 

“Alright, fine by me.” He stands and offers her his arm, which she takes.

They breach the cold of the outside, and she shivers, before clearing her throat.

“It’s nice to have you around again.”

“Oh? Then why didn’t ya call me sooner?” His tone is casual and teasing, but there is bite to the question. 

“I didn’t know if I could. I thought you were probably...gone. Besides, there’s my parents to think of.”

Beetlejuice scowls. “Four spoilsports, they are.”

“They were trying to protect me,” she insists, instinctively protective. 

He is floating a few inches off the ground, gliding by her side, not meeting her eye. “I wasn’t gonna hurt ya. I could never hurt you. Honest, babes, honest. Hell, I wasn’t gonna do anything. You were sixteen and I may be depraved, that’s true, but anything between us was strictly business. We made a deal, ya know?” 

She feels her heart drop. Sure, she had been young, but she hadn’t been that young. “Strictly business?” she echoed in a questioning tone, trying to keep her voice cavalier.

“Well,” he begins carefully, “you’re...you. I’m not gonna pretend I didn’t feel somethin’ when I looked at you. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t like that. It was it’s own sorta thing.”

Lydia, feeling herself growing bold with weariness, looks up at him, stilling in an alleyway. “Wasn’t like what?”

He shuts his eyes tight. “You were always more important than any quick fuck, Lyds. You were different, from the moment I saw you. I only wish I’d gotten ta know ya better, before-”

He stops abruptly.

"You could get to know me now," she offers, her voice small. “We could get to know each other.”

There is silence, for a few steps.

“What’d ya think of me, first time you saw me?” He is trying to keep his tone impartial, but she can hear something creeping into his voice.

“I thought you seemed...interesting. I don’t know how to explain it. There was something about you that just...caught in my mind, I guess.”

“Did ya think of me often, then?”

She bites her lip, weighs the risk of honesty. “Yes,” she says simply. After a moment, she asks, “Did you think of me?”

“More ‘n I thought I would. More ‘n I’d care to admit.”

She wants to know what he means, but before she can formulate the question, he asks, “Why don’t ya have anyone to walk home with?”

Embarrassed and defensive, she snaps “It’s late, okay?”

“Ya need friends, Lyds. Real, breather friends.”

“How do you know I don’t have any friends?” she asks, aiming for accusatory but landing closer to forlorn. 

“It’s ok, babes, you’re not the only one who has a hard time workin’ well with others. I just mean, you’re alive still, and interesting and smart, and you breathers need companionship.”

“I’ve got you for that, haven’t I?” she says before she can catch herself.

His expression hardens. After a pause, he concedes, “Of course.”

There is tension and awkwardness that she doesn’t know what to do with. They turn a corner, and the wind starts to pick up. Before she can think of something to say, he asks, “Were ya really gonna kill yourself, that night?”

“Yes,” she answers, too quickly. He swears under his breath.

“Is that the last time you thought about it?”

“No,” she confirms, voice quiet and small, after a long pause. He swears again. 

“Lyds, you have to promise me you won’t. Please. Just, trust me on this one, please-” He is nearly pleading, and she is taken aback.

She thinks for a moment. “Okay, but you have to promise no unnecessary killings while you’re out here in exchange.”

“You drive a hard bargain,” he says, chuckling and landing in front of her, offering his hand. They shake on it.

Without looking at him, she says, “I’ll-uh. I’ll try to make more friends, too. If you think it’s a good idea.”

“I do. It’s not healthy, you bein’ alone all the time.”

“But you have to look after yourself better, too.”

He chuckles. “I’ll see what I can do. Now, let’s get back to gettin’ to know each other, shall we?”

“Okay. Tell me a secret.”

“Sometimes I listen to Abba.”

She laughs, and smiles up at him broadly. He glares, but there’s no malice behind it. “Your turn.”

“I’m scared of birds, and of telling people my secrets.”

He laughs, briefly turns into a marabou stork and whistles something adjacent to “Boo”. When he emerges as himself, he has a cigarette dangling from his lips.

"Favorite flower?" 

"Roses," she replies absentmindedly, "They're classic."

They end up taking the long way home.

*****

They continue on like this for a while; she calls him as often as she dares, for stupid little things, for important things, to see him. (Once, it is to open a jar; once, she starts a grease fire in her small kitchen out of desperation.) She cums alone in her bed more times a night than is healthy, and can barely keep his name out of her mouth as she does. 

She is true to her promise to him; she starts a book club, with the most tolerable people in her photography program: Maggie, small and quiet but intelligent, Quinn, lanky and clever, and Mal, deadpan and spitfire. She doesn’t love them, but she could like them, and she begrudgingly does notice that she feels better, with the increased social contact.

She wants to fuck him, but if that were all she wanted, she would’ve done it by now. She wants to know him. She wants- fuck if she knows, if he’s even capable of giving what she wants.

*****

“Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.”

“What’s doin’, babes?” 

She’s sitting at her desk, laptop in front of her, desk strewn with papers. This time, he floats lazily above her. He’s clad in a horrifically patterned yellow Hawaiian shirt and a pair of hideous green pants. She clings to her plan, and answers nonchalantly.

“Not much, but I’m working on a paper I thought you might have some input on.”

“Oh?” He lights a cigarette, taking a deep drag before blowing a long stream of smoke straight up in the air.

“It’s about a philosophy paper about death,” she says, trying to remain casual. “Figured you might have something to add.”

He flicks his cigarette, ashing it casually. “And why is that?”

"Well, you're dead, aren't you?"

"Deader than a doornail."

"And? What are your thoughts on the matter?"

"To tell the truth, babes, it's awful bureaucratic, terribly cold, and anyone still alive should just enjoy themselves and not think too much about it." He fidgets with his cigarette, not making eye contact with her. She decides to goad him.

"You have fun, though."

"Of fucking course I do, but I have to make it all myself and let me tell you, it is no cake walk."

"How did you die?"

He freezes, drops the cig. It disappears somewhere on the way down. He recovers quickly, dusting the ash from where it snagged his shirt in its descent.

"Are you writing an essay or a novel?"

"That depends, are you in the market for a biographer?"

He laughs, a good hearty laugh, and lazily spins through the air.

"The day I decide to pursue breather fame via Barnes and Nobles, you're hired." He pauses to light himself a new cigarette, and she types a brief summary of his answer (she does, after all, have to write this essay at some point). A pleasant, if tense, silence settles between them. After a few puffs, he asks, "Is that all ya needed, babes? Not that I'd mind staying longer-"

"I was hoping you'd come to the park with me tonight, I wanna get some shots of the creek at night," she replies, quicker than she should have, but she can't help her earnest. He grins, landing squarely on his feet in front of her desk.

"Then what're ya waitin’ for? Let's go!"

*****

That night, the park is empty. They stand on the bank of the creek, fireflies flitting between them. She sets up her tripod, and he wades into the water, sloshing and grabbing at waterbugs. She laughs, feels the moonlight on her skin, and, in watching him, feels the bittersweet stirrings of longing twang in tune with a surge of contentment. 

Focusing her camera, she captures the ripples he makes, sourceless to the camera’s eye. He disappears for a little while. She takes a few more shots, gets the reflection of the moon, and is lining up a beautiful shot of some fledgling owls when she feels him return to her side.

“Nice night, babes,” he says, and there’s an edge of nervousness to his voice that she is unfamiliar with. She presses the button, and turns to face him. He is shaking almost imperceptibly, and clutching a bunch of dead roses that looked as though they had been red.   
His hair, usually green, is a soft magenta, and he is even paler than usual. 

“Yea,” she says serenely, “it is.”

He avoids her eyes, and extends the flowers in her general direction. “I picked these for you. I meant- I mean- they were alive, but they died soon as I picked ‘em. I mean, I figure, that always happens but I don’t mean- they didn’t just die, they died. Guess I’m just too dead for some things, huh?” He laughs, but it is joyless and defeated.

She takes the flowers from him gently, and presses them to her chest. “The nice thing about dead flowers,” she says quietly, “is that they last forever.” After a moment, she puts the flowers down next to her camera bag and steps closer to him. She almost stalls in fear, but she caresses his face, coaxes his eyes to meet her own. 

“Thank you, Beetlejuice,” she says, holding his gaze. Her stomach is full of butterflies and her cheeks are tingling, and she can see him puzzling it out, and he lets out a tiny sigh of relief. It is just the two of them, alone in a valley in a municipal park by the side of a creek, inches apart. She feels more alive, more whole, than she has in years. 

That night she cums to the thought of making love, of being made love to. Afterwards, she sobs.

*****

She allows herself one more moment of frantic self-doubt while she double checks that her bag is packed. Sunhat, sunscreen, wallet, phone, towel, book. Before she can chicken out, she summons him to her.

“Heya, babes.” he says jovially, appearing beside her, today in his signature pinstripes and loose tie. He eyes her up as though he can’t help it. Excellent, she thinks to herself, vindicated in her choice of a dark black bikini beneath a sheer, tight lilac dress. “Looking good,” he says, shooting her finger guns and coughing. “Well, what can I do ya for? I mean-”

“I’d like to go to the beach,” she says, demure and enjoying having the upper hand, “but it’ll be much faster if I can take the carpool lane to get there.”

“O-kay?” he replies, quirking an eyebrow up in question.

“So you’ll come? Wonderful. We ought to leave right away.” She takes his hand and leads him down to the carpark. She doesn’t often move her car, for fear of losing her parking spot, but she does enjoy a good drive, and she likes her car even more. It’s a second-hand hearse she bought for herself senior year in high school, and it makes her smile each time she turns the key in its ignition. Beetlejuice seems to approve, sidling in beside her and lounging with his feet up on the dash.

While she drives, he fiddles with the radio, tuning it to stations she’s sure don’t exist, making her laugh with silly fake talk shows and strange music she’s fairly certain is straight from the Neitherworld. She has the windows rolled down, and is humming when she glances over to catch him smirking.

“What’re you up to?” she asks suspiciously.

He looks out the window. “There’s no carpool lane on this highway, babes.”

“So?” she says, careless, carefree, she’s running out of patience for pretense. “There could have been.”

*****

The beach is lovely; small and uncrowded. She seeks out a particularly secluded corner, sets down her bags and, without warning, drops her dress to the floor. She knows her bathing suit is particularly revealing, she chose it on purpose for the way it hugs her curves and shows off enough of her tits and ass that she doubts he’ll be able to contain himself. Unless he just isn’t interested. She brushes the thought aside and turns to see him standing, dumbstruck. 

“We’re at the beach, you know,” she says conversationally. “You’re a little overdressed.”

He looks down at his pinstripe suit, and she sees him do the math. Nervousness is so unnatural to his frame, usually so possessed with confidence. He snaps, and he’s wearing striped swim trunks and a black pair of flip-flops. She cannot help herself; her eyes greedily take in his body, filling in the gaps she’d had to surmise about in her fantasies. He is stocky, equal parts chubby and muscular, and has an unnaturally white pallor to him. Moss and mold grow in small patches across his chest and neck. Too late she notices his hair paling to purple; when was the last time he’d been this visible, to anyone he cared about? It was impossible to say.

“Lookin’ good, Beej,” she says, feeling herself blush.

“Aw, you don’t have to lie to me, babes. I know I’m gross.” he replies, tossing himself down in her beach chair.

“Maybe so. I meant it, though,” she says. 

She sees the sunscreen in her bag, and smiles to herself as she pours some out into her hand.

“Do you think you could help me out? I can’t reach my back.” She sees him perk up, and he disappears only to reappear so close to her they’re nearly touching, and she can feel what would be his breath on her neck. Beetlejuice doesn’t breathe, but he does exude a sort of chill that is completely singular to him.

“It’d be my pleasure, Lyds.” 

She tosses him the bottle, and relishes the feeling of his fingers running up and down her back for far longer than necessary. When he stills, she turns and says, “Let’s go explore!”

He follows her, floating above as she wades into the water. He won’t get in, and she’s willing to cut her losses on that; he’s here, with her, after all. She knows he is looking at her, properly looking at her. 

In the end, they are sitting beside each other, her with her nose in a book, half reading, leaning on his shoulder, him recounting some long-winded con from the Neitherworld. When he finishes, there is a pleasant silence that falls between them.

He clears his throat, after a while, and says “Ya know, you don’t always have to have a reason to summon me. I’d come just to be with you.”

She blushes and hums. “If you’d like to be with me, you don’t have to wait for me to call,” she murmurs. “I never put you away, after all.”

*****

He starts flitting in and out of her apartment, after that, like a tomcat, coming and going easily and fitting nicely everywhere. She can always tell he’s back by the unmistakable chill, the way the air catches something musty and darkly sweet, the way she feels something that is unmistakably hope. Sometimes he sticks around for book club, invisible, taunting her guests. She often has to stifle her laughter. Maggie starts bringing hand-knit woolen blankets, to combat the strange, ever-present chill. Mal suggests her apartment is haunted. Quinn notes she’s looked happier than they’ve ever seen her.

A year passes by, since she first summoned him, and time keeps marching on. During club one evening, he’s laying spread eagle on her floor in the middle of their circle, doing a corpse impression he thinks is both extremely humorous and convincing, complete with chalk outline and bloodstains. Once Mal, Maggie, and Quinn leave, she quietly lays down beside him, and they play a very quiet game of chicken until he breaks and says “You alright there, babes?” and she dissolves into giggles.

“Just fine,” she whispers, “I’m just fine.” They lay there for a few minutes more, looking at one another, an inch or two apart. Lydia barely dares to breathe, Beetlejuice almost feels like he is, for the first time in centuries.

Finally, after what could have been a whole summer of contentedness, she murmurs, “Do you like brandy?”

“Brandy is good,” he says, voice all gravel and something she can’t quite place. 

She gets up gingerly, and he follows, floating ever so slightly as she pours them each a glass and, perhaps self-indulgently, sets her favorite Vashti Bunyan album to play. She raises her glass to her lips and lets the music wash over her. He is watching her intently, brow furrowing as she sighs some little heartsick sound. 

“Whats’amatter, babes?”

She chuckles, knocks back a little more brandy. “It’s nothing.”

He crosses to her in one stride, caging her into the dining room table with a hand on either side of her. “C’mon, Lyds, what’s wrong?”

“It’s silly,” she pleads.

“Can’t be that silly, if it’s botherin’ ya.”

She bites her lip. “I always pictured sharing this bottle with you and listening to this record and. And dancing with you. It’s stupid.” She squeezes her eyes shut, certain he’s about to scoff at her, not even daring to pray.

“That’s not stupid at all,” he says, voice gentle and quiet and thick, and she feels the cold shock of his hands softly coax her clenched fists until they relax. He puts his hands gingerly on her hips, and begins to sway with her. She musters the temerity to open her eyes and sees him looking at her. There is more love in his eyes in that moment than she has felt in her entire life, and she begins to smile, wrapping her arms around his neck gently. Their height difference allows her to lay her head on his chest, and for a second she almost thinks she can hear his heartbeat, but she realizes, in fact, it’s hers.

Beetlejuice, to her surprise, is an excellent dancer, and after a moment he takes one of her hands into his own, and begins to lead her in a smooth sort of two-step waltz. She giggles in sheer wonder and joy. As the tempo picks up, he grins down at her and picks her up, spinning her around until they dissolve into laughter, but they do not disentangle from each other, merely sliding to the floor in one another’s arms. 

With a snap of his fingers, their glasses of brandy accompany them, and he takes a sip as Lydia catches her breath. 

“That was so much fun!” Lydia says, giggling. 

“And to think,” he replies fondly, gesticulating with a hand cradling a smoking cigarette, “you almost didn’t even ask.”

“Well,” she says, “I didn’t think you’d be interested in hearing my silly little fantasies.”

He puts out his cigarette roughly and pointedly on her tile kitchen floor, but she is too taken by a sudden intensity in his eyes to care. He shifts so he’s nearly straddling her, leaning close to her but never breaking eye contact. She feels her eyes grow wide. “I think you’ll find,” he rasps, “I want to hear every one of your little fantasies.”

“All of them?” she murmurs, glancing down at his lips. 

“Every single goddamned one, babes,” he growls, reaching up to cradle her face with one of his hands. 

She doesn’t answer, not with words. Instead, she gently presses her lips to his. He moans into her mouth and pulls her into his lap. He kisses exactly as she thought he would; frantically and passionately. She feels something she’s never felt before blossom in her chest as she wraps her arms around his neck and clings to him. He tastes like moss and cigarettes and something darker and she wants. As their kisses reach a fever pitch he pushes her away.

“If we’re doin’ this,” he says, gasping, “We need to talk about it first.”

“What is there to say?” she asks, voice husky from the kissing, chest heaving. “It’s you. It’s always been you.” She goes in to kiss him again, but he stills her with a hand on her shoulder.

“Lyds, you. You’re a breather. You’re the best goddamned breather I’ve ever met, probably that’s ever existed, and the sexiest, to boot. Of course I care about you, of course I- I want you, but Lydia,” his voice breaks, and he looks away, “you shouldn’t do this. You-you deserve better than this.” 

Now it is her turn to reach out and caress his face, suddenly so sullen and defeated. “Beetlejuice”, she says simply, adorning his name with all the love she’s been saving for him, “It doesn’t get any better than this. This is what I want, you, you are what I want.”

After a long moment, he meets her eye. “You have to be sure,” he says, voice thick with emotion. “I don’t think I can do this halfway.”

She grins for what feels like the very first time. “I’ve never been surer of anything.”

And with that, he hoists her up in his arms, bridal style, and stands. She’s certain he could transport them there in an instant, but he seems to savor walking with her in his arms. He kicks the door to her bedroom open, and lays her down on her bed like she is the most precious thing he has ever touched. He looks down at her in quiet awe.

It is nothing like she’d ever imagined, and everything she could possibly hope for.

She sits up, pushes him down onto the bed beside her, and straddles him, popping the buttons on his shirt and tossing it and his tie aside. She presses open mouthed kisses on his neck and feels a strange laceration on the skin there. He tenses under her fingertips and tongue, and she puts two and two together: he had been Juno’s assistant. Of course he hadn’t wanted to tell her how he died. Of course he was so insistent she not kill herself. 

“Oh, Beetlejuice,” she sighs. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s ok. You were bound to find out some time.” He pauses, shakes slightly. “It was a long time ago.”

Pulling back, she looks at him. He's avoiding her eyes. “You know you’re the most magnificent person I’ve ever seen,” she whispers. A soft, sad sort of smile plays his lips. She cups his face in her hands, bringing her lips to his. She kisses him softly, softly, like the water kisses the shoreline, and she feels him come back to himself beneath her. He grips her round the waist and in one deft, quick movement he flips them over, pinning her to the bed, laying above her. His eyes are glinting with something dangerous, and she gets the distinct feeling he finally believes what she’s been telling him this whole time; that she wants him, and only him.

He kisses her hard, rucking her shirt out of the waistband of her skirt. He reaches up to feel she's not wearing a bra, and it seems to ignite something in him as grabs at her tits and kisses her even more fervently. She feels as if her whole body is pulsing, as every moment until now she was waiting to be alive and this, this, this is what life tastes like, moss and cigarettes and a hint of blood as he bites at her lip. She tangles her hands in his hair, a dark and beautiful red hue, tugging him impossibly closer. He moans into her mouth, ripping her shirt off of her entirely. She shimmies out of her skirt, leaving her in just a skimpy pair of black lace panties. He growls at the feeling of her skin, shifting to bite little red circles up and down the white column of her neck. As he bucks against her, she can feel his cock straining at its confines. It fills her with more desire than she knew she was capable of feeling.

Leaning back to admire his work, Beetlejuice whistles at the sight of her beneath him. He reaches down and finds he can feel how wet she is for him, even through her panties. 

“You ready for me, babes?” he whispers against her neck.

“Yes, god, please, yes,” she moans. She’s not sure where his pants go, or how her panties end up on the floor, but in an instant she feels him pushing inside of her. The stretch of his cock is delicious, and there is a strange tingle of its coolness wrapped in the tight heat of her pussy. Slowly, he inches inside of her until the full girth and width of his cock is in her. She opens her eyes without even realizing she had closed them, looking up at him. She smiles serenely for a moment, and then reaches up and pulls him down for a bruising kiss.

He begins to move, his pace frantic and fast and hard, and she wraps her legs around his waist, whimpering and moaning. He fucks her like he’s telling her she’s beautiful, like he’s burying a thousand things he’d like to tell her inside of her. He fucks her like he’s loving her, and he may very well be.

He bundles her into his arm, burying his hands in her hair and looking at her eyes.

“God, Lydia,” he croons, and the sound of her name on his tongue pushes her over the edge. She cums harder than she ever has, pulsing tightly around him, crying out, and he fucks her right through it before he cums too. 

He slumps on top of her, kissing each angry bite mark on her neck gently and slowly. She feels his cum start to drip out of her as he reluctantly pulls out and rolls onto his side, next to her. She props herself up on one arm, looking at him fondly, lovingly. He looks right back, in awe. His eye catches on the ring on her left hand, the one he’d put there years ago, the one he’d noticed when she’d first invited him back into her life, that he hadn’t dared to mention.

“You’re still wearin’ my ring,” he says gruffly, cautiously hopeful.

She grins and caresses his face with the hand that bears his mark.

“Proudly, bug, proudly.”

******

In the end, it is simple and good and right. 

She graduates, but keeps in touch with her friends; the four join an artists’ collective together, and Lydia’s photography makes her enough money to get by. She moves to a bigger apartment, and buys a bigger bed, and striped sheets to match. 

Beetlejuice doesn’t sleep, not properly, but he lays there each night anyway, holding her. 

In the end, it is simple: she keeps him from killing, and he keeps her from killing herself.

In the end, it is good: she catches him crickets, and he brings her flowers.

In the end, it is right: she loves him, and he loves her.

The emptiness isn’t gone altogether; there are moments still when gloom threatens to overtake her. But she never has to face it alone again, and it always recedes, and at the end of each day, no matter how shitty, her love is there. 

She’d never say it out loud, but she feels almost as though they were meant to be together. Why else would they fit so neatly, curled up around one another? Perhaps this had been written in the stars a long time ago, tucked neatly with his namesake in Orion’s belt.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!! I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments, and I'll hopefully be posting another fic within a week or so- I have so many ideas for these two!!!


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